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It would be like asking a company to build Hoover Dam, the Transcontinental Railroad or the Interstate system without Federal assistance.

2006 ONR NDIA - Space Solar Power Workshop

Speaking as a former strategic planner for the largest electric power company in the US, there are simply too many engineering, financial, regulatory and managerial risks for any existing organization - utility, aerospace, or government to undertake building an SSPS. This conclusion is not a new:

“In the bureaucratic format, satellite power has no natural home and no built-in constituency. NASA, now a timid, fearful NASA made up of aging pre-retirees rather than the young tigers who made Apollo work in just eight years, would be frightened out of its skin by a tough, make-it-work assignment with a tight budget and a tighter time scale. And NASA’s charter doesn’t cover energy. The DOE? Its charter doesn’t include space. The NSF? Satellite power isn’t science, it’s engineering.” - The World’s Energy Future Belongs in Orbit”, by Dr. Gerard O’Neill, Trilogy January/February 1992

It would be open to private investment, as Comsat was, and given certain developmental subsidies.

2006 ONR NDIA - Space Solar Power Workshop

The bridge needed to build SSP is to lower the current prices of space photovoltaics, space transportation, and other necessary commodities - now too high for SSP to be profitable. We agree. With higher PV production and launch volumes, etc., Sunsat would be legislatively equipped to build those bridges, just as those previous public/private companies did.

In the same way, similar learning curves, like Moore’s law, describe other dropping costs of technology with increasing volume, such as the low cost potential available to cut the cost of access to orbit if higher flight rates are achieved by reusable launch vehicles, especially private launch vehicles.

A dozen other orbital space pioneers, led by Elon Musk and his reusable vehicle Falcon, are working to overcome policies and prices all but blocking new vehicle development in a dismally poor launch market outlook (due to high launch costs) with their new generation of private reusable launch vehicles.

New generation vehicles – some already in design – would drive the cost still lower ashigher flight rates are quickly reached. Doubtless many other new space businesses would benefit.

Sunsat Corp, however, would have one goal – clean baseload solar energy from GSO to power planet earth.

2006 ONR NDIA - Space Solar Power Workshop

When reaching full production, Sunsat Corp. would use approximately 42,000 flights per year to GSO, of ten metric tons each. By comparison, Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson and Chicago’s O’Hare International Airports each logged nearly a million takeoffs and landings in 2005. Prices would quickly fall once subsidies established market volume.

Ground-based solar energy or wind power, has an average availability of 25-30% of a typical day due to night, rain, clouds, or wind too fast or too slow. Baseload power plants must be ready to immediately substitute for these plants in any of those conditions.

Space solar power from GSO, however, is available continuously. While a typical baseload power plant is available 90% of the year, Space solar power would be available 99% of the year. There is no cleaner or more secure energy supply now available.

Current world demand exceeds the supply. Once worldwide petroleum production peaks, geopolitics and market economics will result in even more significant price increases and security risks… Oil wars are not out of the question. - Energy Trends and Implications for U.S. Army, by Fournier & Westervelt, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers R & D Center, www.defenseindustrydaily.com/files/2005-09_US_Army_Corps_of_Engineers_Energy_Trends.pdf

Worry now, the problem is enormous. There will be massive shortages unless we act in time. Mitigation takes a long time. Peak oil is not a theory; 33 out of 48 of the largest oil producing countries have hit peak. There is no warning for peak, as production goes up until the peak. The drop off is sudden. It will require more than a decade to transition our civilization away from our heavy dependence on oil. Nothing close to the efforts envisaged have yet begun. - Robert Hirsch, SAIC, testimony before Pentagon and U.S. Congress Committee on Energy and Commerce, http://energycommerce.house.gov/108/hearings/12072005Hearing1733/hearing.htm & www.peakoil.net www.netl.doe.gov/otiic/World_Oil_Issues/Oil_Peaking_NETL.pdf & www.odac-info.org

Rising CO2 from burning fossil fuels is wreaking havoc on our global ecosystems through climate change. We need to start weaning our world off fossil fuels.

SSP requires no fuel and has no operations personnel – it is an antenna. 99% of the sunlight would pass through to working farmland underneath it.

Overall SSP system efficiency is expected to be slightly over 50%.A typical transmitting antenna diameter (in space) for a 1 GW SPS system is 1 km; The rectenna on the ground would be about 4 km.

2006 ONR NDIA - Space Solar Power Workshop

“The Congress declares that it is the policy of the United States to establish, in conjunction and in cooperation with other countries, as expeditiously as practicable a commercial space solar power satellite system, as part of environmentally enhanced and improved global electric power generation and networks, which will be responsive to public needs and national objectives, which will serve the growing electric power needs of the United States and other countries, and which will contribute to world peace, understanding, harmony and increased sustainable electric power generation and economic development.”